Gene.Ai

The Project

In the summer of 2014 I was traveling through Southeast Asia, and anticipating the fall semester I found myself wanting to again work on a real project as I had in the spring for my Interactive 1 course. I sent a query out to several targeted channels for NYC entrepreneurs and developers and received a number of interesting responses. I connected with a data scientist and researcher at Columbia, who had been building a genetic search engine to identify and predict viral and bacterial mutations in medical diagnostic samples. The project sparked my social and scientific interest, so I agreed to design the interface, and write some of the front-end programming for the website.

This project was a great learning experience because while my partner knew a lot of back-end programming languages, he was unfamiliar with web development. The kind of website he wanted to build requires server-side scripting beyond basic HTML, CSS, and front-end JS and into more advanced programming, which I wanted to learn. I worked on this project throughout the course and learned the basics of D3.JS, MySQL, and PHP.